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Fort McMurray firefighter Jerron Hawley knew two things right off the bat.

“I knew it was something I’d never seen before,” says Hawley.

“And I knew it was going to be a really bad day.”

On that day, May 3, 2016, Hawley drove in a pumper to the edge of town to watch flames leap from the forest to bush-side houses there. The scale of the ensuing disaster would turn out to be beyond his reckoning.

The coming conflagration — which took six days to fully douse in the city — would claim two lives, 1,595 buildings and cause about $3.6 billion in damage.

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It would also prompt a citywide evacuation — the largest in Alberta history.

Some 80,000 to 90,000 people were forced to flee the hard-hat town — which had bulged out into the tinder bush over recent decades as workers flocked in from across the country for jobs in the nearby oil patch.

The fire swept into Fort McMurray under a hurtling plasma of smoke.

Firefighter Graham Hurley, who was off that Tuesday, recalls that the morning had broken placidly enough.

He’d woken with plans to putter around his house outside of town and had driven to a hardware store late morning to fetch some fencing supplies. But sitting in his idling truck, he took in the onrushing smoke with a mounting sense of doom.

“What really made it sink in for me was the way the smoke was pressuring out of the horizon,” Hurley says. “That told me the (fire) was really fast and really close.”

Hurley’s dread was mingled with a surreal bemusement, however, as he looked around the Lowe’s parking lot.

“I was filming the smoke (on a cellphone) and I saw that everyone else around me there was doing the same thing,” he says. “It kind of seemed like a movie.”

Hurley, Hawley and fellow Fort McMurray firefighter Steve Sackett would employ their cellphone cameras dozens of times over the coming week, recording the fire and its damage as they worked almost nonstop on the blaze and evacuation.

Those pictures, and the notes they took during brief rest breaks, would form the basis of the book Into The Fire: The Fight to Save Fort McMurray, published last week.

Sackett, who was packing for a visit to Calgary, near where he’d grown up, ditched those plans after clambering onto his garage roof May 3 to assess the encroaching flames.

“It looked pretty serious, so I went down to Hall 1 and just hopped in with these guys,” he says. “I understood my vacation was going to be delayed for quite a bit.”

Fort McMurray was broiling in a dry, spring swelter, with temperatures topping 30 C before the boreal nightmare hit.

No one is certain how it started. But the fire had erupted in a remote area southwest of the city May 1.

In two days, it churned through thousands of hectares of forest — still brown and left parched by an early snow melt — before sweeping into town on high, shifting winds.

(The wildfire would burn on until July and eat up some 500,000 hectares of forest before it petered out.)

Last year, Alberta's government declared a state of emergency after wildfires prompted the evacuation of over 80,000 people from Fort McMurray. Plumes of smoke and roads lined with cars could be seen from the air.

It first touched down in Fort McMurray’s suburban Beacon Hill neighbourhood on the southwest edge of the “city,” which is technically an “urban service area” in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.

“We started evacuating people,” says Sackett, whose crew had raced to the scene. “That was the first priority.”

Fortunately, Hawley says, many Fort McMurray residents had the concept of disciplined flight drilled into them beforehand.

“Pretty much every household has somebody with some type of safety training just because of the dangerous nature of the work out here,” he says.

“It’s an oil patch city essentially. And their instincts were definitely in the right spot. By the time we got up there, there was already a parade of cars leaving.”

Some homeowners, he says, had even posted notes on their doors letting rescue workers know they were safely gone.

As well, Hurley says, oil extraction is brawny work and the migrant workforce populating the town was younger and healthier than most.

“I think in some ways it did help, people had a little more get-up-and-go,” he says.

All of Fort McMurray had to do just that by 6:30 p.m. — when evacuation orders in several outlying neighbourhoods were extended to the entire town. Meanwhile, the fire and evacuation were beamed by newscasts around the globe.

Residents dispersed to friends and families they had separated from across the country, or to 13 evacuation centres set up around the province. Some were as far away as Calgary, 700 kilometres to the south.

Many of those evacuees have yet to return, says Erin O’Neill, operations manager with the city’s 50-member Recovery Task Force.

The 1,595 structures lost to the blaze included 2,579 living units that had housed both single occupants and families.

Her group’s work began May 15 — before the fire outside town was fully extinguished — with the drawing up of a re-entry plan.

That plan would centre on getting residents and businesses back into a city that had been all but deserted for more than a month.

Three days later, a June 1 re-entry date was announced. But some 2,000 residents of about 700 standing homes — isolated in three of the city’s most badly damaged areas — would have to wait longer.

“The medical officer of health said that due to the amount of destruction in those areas she did not want people reoccupying at that time,” O’Neill says.

Concerns rested mainly on toxic ash blowing off the downed buildings. And through May and June these burned-out piles were sprayed with resin-like substances known as tackifiers to hold the loose debris down.

By the end of August more than half of the isolated homes would be reopened, but the rest would sit empty until November, says O’Neill, who earned an urban planning degree from the University of Guelph.

Elsewhere in the city, many homes still reeked of smoke and food that had rotted in hydro-less freezers after residents fled.

There were also the floods from above. Water bombing runs had errantly hit standing homes in their hectic efforts to douse the burning ones, O’Neill says.

“We’re hearing now that some of those homes will have to be demolished,” she says.

To clear the worst of the mess and prepare for new construction, officials streamlined permits for demolition, building and land use.

(Fortunately, as a relatively new city, most of Fort McMurray’s power lines were buried, along with other hard infrastructure like water and sewage and essential hydrants, and the treatment plants were up to code by the June 1 re-entry.)

A new book by three firefighters gives a first-hand account of the fight against "The Beast." (Jerron Hawley)

By the end of September, all but 88 of 1,595 burnt-out properties were cleared. Owners used either an Insurance Bureau of Canada contractor, private insurance, Red Cross funding or their own companies to ready their sites for rebuilds.

And while that reconstruction was slowed by a Northern Alberta winter, its speed has impressed O’Neill, who visits the sites often. She says permits have been issued for 645 new buildings. And more than 400 foundations have been poured and inspected as of this April.

“Every time I go into the areas … you see another house popping up — another house coming, another house coming,” she says.

The summer, O’Neill estimates, more than 800 structures will go up, including the majority of lost condominiums. Still, she estimates a full rebuild will take three to five years and that vacant lots may remain even then.

Most of the rebuilding money is coming from private insurers, but provincial and federal sources have already paid out $140 million for firefighting costs and infrastructure repairs, O’Neill says.

And donations from people across the globe helped the Red Cross raise more than $300 million. That money has been used to aid the uninsured, support evacuee travel and other humanitarian efforts.

Meanwhile, in efforts to prevent another disaster, much of the bush that fringes the city has been cut back by at least 30 metres, O’Neill says.

These firebreak corridors, many of which were cleared by the original blaze and efforts to tame it, are being spread with topsoil and seeded with grass.

And the beloved Birchwood Trails that crisscross Fort Mac are also being culled of their most flammable trees, with sturdier hardwoods being planted in many places.

“It won’t stop a fire, but it will stop the spread of a fire,” O’Neill says of the combined efforts.

While her task force was co-ordinating a physical recovery, however, it was also helping to deal with some of the psychological devastation the catastrophe had caused.

“It was one of the biggest challenges for sure,” she says.

O’Neill says information centres around the city were already in place before the mass June re-entry, she says.

“If somebody needed someone to talk to they were right there on site providing that mental health support.”

In addition, Alberta Health Services and the Red Cross have continued to offer psychological support in schools and across the community, she says.

And a May 3 anniversary event, set in one of the city’s large parks, will offer yoga and barbecues to help with community healing.

While issues remain, however, a “new normal” has set on the city, O’Neill says that had seemed implausible during the days of fire.

That the death toll would sit at only two — and that 90 per cent of the city was saved — is “a badge of honour” for both rescue workers and Fort Mac in general, Hurley says.

But in the days of fire, a much larger body count had seemed inevitable – especially among the firefighters themselves.

“There were definitely times where I wondered if we were going to get out of certain situations,” says Sackett.

Somehow only two people lost their lives in the fire. (Doug Noseworthy)

And as fatigue set in, he says, fear only mounted as nerves became more and more frayed.

Most in the 160-strong Fort McMurray department would be in uniform a full week before they could get “an honest-to-God break” from their duties, Hurley says.

And they were soon joined by teams from all over Alberta and across Canada.

“It was one of the coolest things to see all these other trucks from Alberta coming up,” says Sackett, who lost his rental unit to the fire. “It was inspiring. Our brotherhood Alberta-wide (and beyond) dropped what they were doing and came up here.”

Hawley, whose home, which was spared, borders the city’s badly hit Timberlea area, says he now sees a new home go up every week.

“When I first moved up here (from Nova Scotia in 2011) that whole area was being developed,” he says. “And to see these houses being built for a second time … that’s going to bring anyone’s spirits up.”

Hawley says he’s still in awe of the way that Fort McMurray’s outlander population came together during the fire and its aftermath.

“Everybody put aside differences … and helped anyone that was in need,” he says.

O’Neill is an Ottawa native herself, but has lived in Fort McMurray for nine years and was not surprised by the cohesion she saw in the community.

“It’s not the same as anywhere else where you’d have all you’re family there … it’s a different community I guess because of our transient nature,” she say.

“I don’t think people really truly realized how much of a community it was before. But that’s just the way Fort McMurray is.”

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